11 Most Popular Pre-sales Software for 2025

If you're in the market for demo automation software, you've likely come across Storylane and Walnut.io. This comparison should help differentiate between both platforms to guide your purchase decision.

Why customers prefer Storylane over Walnut.io

At a high level, Storylane and Walnut share several similarities. They’re both demo automation softwares that support HTML/CSS demos, browser extension-based capture, demo engagement analytics and insights, and CRM integrations.

That being said, Storylane stands out significantly when it comes to product versatility, user satisfaction, pricing flexibility, and overall platform capabilities. Here's how:

1. Flexible demo formats vs. HTML-only approach

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to capture interactive demos:

• Image/video demos: Screenshot or video-based demos with sequential steps. While they have limited interactivity, they're quick to create, load faster, and work well for specific use cases.
  
• HTML/CSS demos: Clickable demos that capture the product's look, feel, and interactions, allowing for editing on-screen elements such as text, data, and graphics.

Walnut focuses exclusively on HTML/CSS-based demos, which can be limiting when teams need video walkthroughs or screenshot-based demos. Storylane, on the other hand, is expressly designed for both demo formats — complete with auto-capture, annotations, guides, blurs, zooms, presenter videos, voiceovers, and more.

This flexibility puts Storylane in a significantly stronger position when it comes to scaling demos across departments and use-cases. Marketing teams can create image-based guided demos for websites, sales teams can use HTML demos for personalized experiences, and customer success can leverage video demos for onboarding.

2. Cross-functional platform vs. sales-centric tool

Walnut.io is built primarily for sales teams, which can create friction when marketing, presales, or customer success teams need to create and manage demos. The platform's focus on sales workflows makes it less accessible for other departments.

Storylane is specifically designed for horizontal adoption across the entire go-to-market organization:

• Marketing teams use it for top-of-funnel engagement
• Sales teams leverage it for personalized demos
• Presales teams rely on it for technical demonstrations
• Customer success teams implement it for onboarding and training

This cross-functional design is evident in features like Demo Hub, which allows teams to create galleries and playlists of demos that address multiple buyer personas and use cases in one place. Walnut does not offer comparable functionality.

3. User satisfaction and ease of use

User satisfaction data reveals a significant gap between the platforms. Walnut currently ranks 17th on G2's demo automation category with a satisfaction score of 32/100, while Storylane maintains substantially higher ratings with a satisfaction score of 99/100.

Storylane's intuitive interface and self-serve capabilities contribute to its higher user satisfaction. The platform's design focuses on practical usability rather than just aesthetic appeal, making it easier for teams to create, manage, and share demos without extensive training.

4. Tiered pricing vs. upfront investment

With a starting price of $9,200/year and no free tier, Walnut requires a substantial commitment upfront. This high entry point can be prohibitive for smaller teams or organizations wanting to test demo automation before making a significant investment.

Storylane’s pricing plans offer a more accessible approach with:

• A self-serve free plan that allows teams to build their first demo without financial commitment
• Tiered pricing options that grow with your needs
• More features available at lower-tier plans compared to Walnut

5. Agentic demo automation with Lily AI

One of Storylane's biggest differentiators against Walnut is Lily, our demo automation agent that helps in two critical ways:

• Easier, faster demo creation for sellers: Generate or improve demos in seconds with product-specific guides, prompt-based editing assistance, voiceovers, and more.
• Contextual demo discovery for buyers: AI-powered guidance that helps prospects navigate through demos based on their specific interests.

Lily's demo creation capabilities include:

• Create with AI: Generate complete demos with guides, voiceovers, and visual enhancements
• AI Avatars: Choose from dozens of avatars or create one of yourself for studio-quality presenter videos
• AI HTML Editor: Customize demo environments with simple prompts — no code needed
• AI Voiceovers / Translation: Access 65+ voices and 25+ languages to expand accessibility

As it stands, Walnut does not currently offer comparable AI features, putting them behind the innovation curve in the rapidly evolving demo automation space.

6. Buyer Hub and superior organization

Storylane's Buyer Hub is a flagship feature that allows teams to showcase libraries of bite-sized product demos, PDFs, videos, and more through galleries and playlists. This organization makes it easier to:

• Present relevant demos to different buyer personas
• Create curated demo experiences for various stages of the buyer journey
• Maintain a centralized repository of demos that different teams can leverage

Though Walnut supports a playlist style demo experience, its organization capabilities are relatively limited, making it challenging to manage multiple demos for different audiences and use cases.

Making your choice

Your decision ultimately depends on your priorities:

Choose Walnut if:

• Your use case is exclusively sales-focused
• You only need HTML-based demos
• You're comfortable with the higher upfront investment

Choose Storylane if:

• You need a platform that works across marketing, sales, and customer success
• You want flexibility in demo formats (HTML, video, screenshots)
• You value AI-powered creation and customization
• You prefer a more accessible pricing model with a free tier
• User satisfaction and ease of use are priorities

The bottom line

While both platforms will help you create interactive demos, Storylane offers a more versatile, user-friendly solution that scales across departments. Walnut's sales-specific approach works for certain teams, but its HTML-only focus, higher price point, and lower user satisfaction scores make it a more limited option for organizations looking to scale their demo strategy.

We encourage you to try both platforms and see the difference for yourself. Storylane's free plan makes it easy to get started without a significant commitment. If you choose to work with us, we hope the question "what's next?" excites you as much as it excites us!

If you're in the market for demo automation software, you've probably come across Storylane and Navattic. This comparison should help you differentiate between both platforms to guide your purchase decision.

Why GTM teams prefer Storylane

At a high-level, customers prefer Storylane for the product functionality, versatility, ease-of-use, commercial model, and rate of innovation.

1. Product functionality

Before diving in, here’s a quick overview of core features common to both Storylane and Navattic — really, they’re table stakes for any modern demo automation platform:

• Self-serve free plan: Build your first demo on your own, for free
• Browser extension: Chrome extension for click-based capturing
• HTML/CSS demos: Clickable, editable HTML-based demo capture
• App integrations: Your usual suspects - CRMs, Slack, Zapier, etc.
• Demo analytics: Account reveal, performance metrics, intent signals, etc.

And with that out of the way, here are a few ways Storylane stands out from Navattic...

1.1 Flexible demo formats

Broadly, there are two formats of interactive demos:

• Image demos: Screenshot or video-based demos with sequential steps. Limited scope to control on-screen elements and interactions, but quick to create and load.
• HTML/CSS demos: Clickable demos that capture the product's look, feel, and interactions. On-screen elements such as text, data, and graphics may be edited. 

In their own words, Navattic only specializes in top-of-funnel HTML demos. Storylane, on the other hand, is expressly designed for both demo formats — complete with auto-capture, annotations, guides, blurs, zooms, presenter videos, voice overs, and more. 

What does this mean for you? With Storylane, you have the flexibility to pick between demo formats based on your needs: image-based guided demos for your website, video demos for email campaigns, HTML demos for sandbox environments, etc.

This flexibility (coupled with the next set of differences) puts Storylane in an unequivocally stronger position when it comes to scaling demos across departments and use-cases.

1.2 Agentic demo automation with Lily AI

One of Storylane’s biggest differentiators against Navattic (and pretty much every other vendor in this category) is Lily, our demo automation agent. Broadly, Lily helps in two ways: 

1. Easier, faster demo creation for sellers
2. Contextual demo discovery for buyers

Here’s a rundown of what you can do with Lily today:

• Create with AI: Generate or improve demos in seconds — complete with product-specific guides, prompt-based editing assistance, voiceovers, zooms, and more.
• AI Avatars: Pick from dozens of avatars or make one of yourself to generate studio-quality presenter videos. You have the option to manually record content in-app as well.
• AI HTML Editor: Customize HTML demo environments on the fly to meet ad hoc requirements. Edit text, images, and graphs with simple prompts — no code needed.
• AI Voiceovers / Translate: Choose from over 65+ voices (or record your own) and 25+ languages to expand accessibility and furnish your demos with a human touch.

As for discovery, think of Lily as a conversation product expert with as much information as your best sales person, available 24/7 to guide prospects through discovery and qualification. Coming soon.

Where’s Navattic at with all this? As it stands, they do not support any comparable features.

1.3 Demo Hub

Next up, we have Demo Hub: one of Storylane’s flagship features to address multiple buyer personas and use-cases in one place with galleries and playlists of demos. Galleries help marketers showcase a library of bite-sized product demos on their website (without overwhelming early stage prospects) while playlists help sales and presales teams share curated demo experiences with later stage prospects.

Navattic does not support any comparable feature to date. As it stands, Navattic’s response to Demo Hub is Demodash, an agency that charges as much as $2000 per demo to create demo centers for their customers.

1.4 Apps galore

Another key differentiator is Storylane's lineup of native apps. We’re the only demo automation vendors to support apps for Gmail, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Desktop (Mac).

• Try the Salesforce app, listed on the Salesforce AppExchange
• Try the HubSpot app, listed on the HubSpot marketplace
• Try the Gmail plugin
• Download the Storylane desktop app

These quality of life improvements are designed especially for sales teams to personalize and share demos without logging into Storylane (plus, easier change management is always nice).

You might be noticing a pattern here: To date, Navattic does not support this functionality — and given their focus on a limited set of use-cases, nor do we believe that they plan to. More on this next.

2. Versatility across GTM

Most demo automation vendors sell to a specific function. Saleo sells to sales. Consensus sells to pre-sales. And Navattic? Well they primarily sell to marketers. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, it can be a limiting factor when you’re looking to scale demo operations across departments and use-cases. 

Storylane is specifically designed for horizontal adoption across marketing, pre-sales, sales, and even customer success, product, and development teams. The differences in product functionality highlighted above (coupled with under the radar features such as secure demo sharing and personalized links for email campaigns) are testament to this claim.

3. Ease of use

As for which demo automation software is easier to use, we’ll let numbers do the talking.

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"Storylane makes it much easier to organize content with its tagging system for chapters and sections. While Navattic allows labeling, it lacks searchability and filtering capabilities, which becomes crucial when managing multiple chapters. I particularly appreciate how Storylane structures chapters with their own dedicated build sections. In contrast, with Navattic, when I created an 80-step process, it stretched into one long, horizontal sequence that required constant scrolling back and forth. Storylane's more concise organization makes me much more excited to build out product demos” - A customer when asked about how Storylane compared to Navattic

4. Commercial models

Upon initial inspection, Storylane is (slightly) more expensive per plan than Navattic. A closer look, however, reveals that we offer several features in our lower tier plans. To name a few:

• Lily AI (Available in Storylane’s free plan onwards vs unavailable on Navattic)
• Account reveal (Available in Storylane’s $40/mo plan vs. Navattic’s $1000/mo plan)
• Demo translations (Available in Storylane’s $40/mo plan vs Navattic’s $1000/mo plan)
• Demo Hub (Available in Storylane’s $500/mo plan vs unavailable on Navattic)
• Offline demos (Available in Storylane’s $1200/mo plan vs. Navattic’s enterprise plan)
• Demo coaching (Available in Storylane’s $1200/mo plan vs. Navattic’s enterprise plan)

If you really think about it, this probably translates to better bang for your buck. But what about the whole “unlimited seats” deal? Sounds great, sure — but how sustainable is it really? As your organization (and demo requirements) start to scale, it’s unrealistic to expect the same support for a 5 seat plan as a 200 seat plan. Another reason why Storylane’s value-based pricing makes more sense for the long run. 

Edit: Recently, Navattic has also started capping their seats per plan. Goes to show that as a commercial model, the whole unlimited seats approach probably didn't work out as intended. 

And there you have it! Both Navattic and Storylane are leading demo automation softwares — but when you break it down, it’s hard to argue against the latter. Storylane's objectively in the clear for most buying considerations: functionality, versatility, ease-of-use, and commercials.

5. On innovation - What’s next?

It may not feel like it (especially to us), but demo automation has only been around for a handful of years. As a category, we’re still in nascent stages. Unlike with established verticals such as CRMs or project management tools, it’s on younger companies like ours to innovate and push the envelope in these “early days” of demo automation.

Nitty-gritty comparisons aside, it’s worth sharing that Storylane has been at the forefront of this since day one. With category-first initiatives like self-serve PLG, Demo Hub, and more recently, Lily AI — innovation continues to be at the heart of our business. If you decide to go with Storylane, we hope the question “what's next?” excites you as much as it excites us!

From day one, our mission has been to simplify B2B buying and selling. When we launched in 2021, we recognized that product demos – a key touchpoint in most customer journeys – generated undue friction for buyers and sellers alike. From both a creation and discovery stand point, demos fell flat in terms of ease-of-use, accessibility, and scalability. This gap is exactly what we set out to close with Storylane.

A trip down Storylane

Storylane's growth has always been marked by industry-first innovations. We began by introducing interactive demos in 2022. The goal was to help teams build quick and simple demos for a range of marketing and sales use-cases. Soon enough, this put us on the map as the fastest, easiest-to-use demo automation tool in the market.

Next, in 2023, we became the first self-serve platform in our category. Here, our goal was to democratize access to demo automation for marketing, sales, and presales teams of all sizes. Today, we work with over 3000 companies ranging from early-stage startups to industry giants such as Microsoft, Gong, and Cognism.

Last year, in 2024, we recognized that one demo wasn’t going to cut it. After all, B2B purchase decisions involve multiple buyer personas, use-cases, and product lines. In such cases, it only makes sense to share multiple, context-specific demos with prospects.

After much anticipation, we launched Demo Hub; another category-first innovation designed to share multiple demos as galleries or playlists.

In 2025, Storylane goes agentic

We’ve done well to get to where we are today — but we know there’s still a ton of scope to simplify B2B buying and selling for everyone involved. We realize that:

• Sellers prefer spending their time on qualified, high-intent deals — not demo operations
• Buyers expect self-guided, context-specific product discovery — with minimal sales intervention

And so, in our attempt to address these all-too-common gaps in the buying experience, we're thrilled to announce Storylane’s boldest innovation yet: Lily, your demo automation agent. 

Meet Lily: Your demo automation agent

Lily is a demo automation agent built for both buyers and sellers. She represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll be thinking about demo creation and discovery going forward, bringing in an agentic approach to Storylane’s existing line of demo automation products.

‍To start with, here’s what's in it for demo creators

‍1. Create with AI: Simply capture your product with Storylane's browser extension and leave the rest to us. Lily will create and optimize demos in a single click — complete with product-specific guides, annotations, and voiceovers.

2. AI Avatars: Pick from dozens of avatars — or make one of yourself. Share a script and generate studio-quality presenter videos in seconds. No camera, edits, or redos needed.

3. AI Voiceovers: Speak your audience’s language — literally.
Generate studio-quality voiceovers in over 60 diverse voices and 25 languages.

4. AI HTML Editor: Customize demos on the fly to meet your prospect's unique needs. Edit text, images, and graphs with just simple, code-free prompts — Lily does the rest.

But wait…there’s more

All this? Just the beginning.

In March, Lily will evolve to support autonomous, contextual demo discovery for buyers. Imagine prospects exploring your product, right on your website, through intelligent conversations with Lily — getting exactly the information they need, when they need it — without any of the friction associated with traditional sales touchpoints.

‍In short, Lily will be a 24/7 tour guide — equipped with as much product knowledge as your best sales rep — to support buyers with contextual, self-serve product discovery.

Looking ahead: sales enablement & beyond

‍As we launch Lily, we're more committed than ever to our founding mission: eliminating friction in B2B buying and selling. We believe agentic demo automation represents the next frontier in B2B sales enablement, moving beyond static product demos to intelligent product experiences.

To our customers who've been part of this journey – thank you. Your feedback and trust have been instrumental in shaping not just Storylane, but the future of demo automation. And to those considering how to make their demo experience more effective and engaging – welcome to the era of agentic demo automation.

‍The future of product demonstrations is here, and we couldn't be more excited to help you tell your product's story in ways never before possible.